Stonehenge
  

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The Sword in the Stone

A picture I took one winter solstice back in the late 1970s or mid 1980s

(either before or after the years of Mrs Thatcher's oppressive police assault on the Stonehenge Free Festival)

 

Winter solstice 2002 - funny how there are always less people in the winter than the summer!

 

   

The website of Tash (Alan Lodge) contains the most complete, passionate, evocative and excellent photographic and textual record of the recent history of popular attempts to celebrate solstices and other events at Stonehenge.

Tash's coverage of the "Battle of the Beanfield" - as he says, more a massacre than a battle - is especially important as a record of the Thatcherite violence of the 1980s and of the commitment of the festival movement to the quest for more celebratory and just ways of living

Tash - I think - from his site
  
   
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The Sacred Sites Project run by Jenny Blain and Robert Wallis is also great for information and photographs of the contested use and abuse of Stonehenge.

Here's their Stonehenge photo gallery

And here's their report on the summer solstice event of 2001

 


Summer solstice dawn 2001 (J. Blain)

  
   
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    And here's a site with loads of links to what I think are good sites too - well, the one's I've had time to browse through are good (for various reasons!).    
   
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What was it like in the old days?
   
         
   
in the early 1970s Wally Hope initiated the Stonehenge People's Free Festival. Although he and his companions camped for a while inside Stonehenge, by 1976 (after Wally's death) the festival was happening in what many of us still call the festival field — north west of Stonehenge. This picture was taken on 2 May 2006, just before it started raining. Maybe on my next visit I'll get a sunny summery photo!    
   
 
   

in the mid-1980s, the police blocked the view of the midsummer sunrise.

A quieter moment (calm before this dawn anyway) in Thatcher's war.

   
         
   
and the police usually blocked access to the Heel Stone and the circle    
       
   

Then they started covering gates and fences for miles around Stonehenge with razor wire.

   
         
   
In the year of the violence of the assault on those who were herded into the infamous Bean Field (the same year as the violence unleashed against the striking miners), I was at Hanging Langford in the Wyle Valley with loads of other merry makers who really wanted to be in a field nearer Stonehenge.    
         
   

1986 I think - many of us camped at the Devil’s Ditch on the Wiltshire Hampshire border. In another pause in the Thatcherite assault, we were actually escorted to Stonehenge and senior police officers actually gained access for us.

Sounds like anarchy to me.

    
       
    In late 1990s, the police thought the children might get violent I think this and the next picture were taken by David - thanks.  
         
   

and even when the celebrants got into the temple the police tried to fill the centre

or maybe this was their attempt to give the sun something to shine on ...

    
         
    But in recent years a festive and sometimes carnivalesque atmosphere has prevailed in and around the stones. I don't have any photos of this because when I've been there I've been celebrating or I've been involved in ceremony and I don't photograph ceremonies. But Tash's site has recent photos as well as recording the bad old days, and the Sacred Sites Project site has some good ones too.    
   
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    In a future update I intend to find some stuff about the current and continuing discussions about widening the A303 - the main road that goes by the south side of Stonehenge. For what its worth, I think its utterly foolish to imagine, as various heritage managers seem to do, that its possible to make the area look like a Neolithic or early Bronze Age landscape simply by disguising a major road. And even if that was possible, I think it would be a mistake: many people see Stonehenge for the first time when they're on that road. OK, so there’s too much traffic, but encouraging more traffic is absolutely NOT the solution. Improving railways would be far better. Quitting the obsessive consumerism would be even more effective. Stonehenge is not an ancient or archaelogical monunment it is a living place in a living landscape.
rant rant rant
  
   
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Stonehenge isn’t just for solstices.

Part of the pleasure of being in the temple is being able to touch these powerful stones and trace the work of our ancestors. Whatever they thought they were building on Salisbury Plain (and I don’t think we need to be sure about that), they left us a glorious place to celebrate ... anything and everything!

   
       
    My latest visit to Stonehenge was at the invitation of In Vivo (a student organisation attached to the section of culture and personality psychology of the Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands) on 2 May 2006 (thanks very much!). We met in the car park and wandered down and up the summer sunrise avenue — where it started to rain. We then set off for Avebury and further adventures. I hope the group enjoyed their visit, I certainly did. It also gave me the opportunity to photograph the three white blobs in the car park    
       
    these three white blobs (here looking roughly eastwards) mark the earliest remaining human change in the Stonehenge landscape. People who lived nearby, possibly settled by the River Avon or nomadic in the region, came to a clearing in the forest that then covered the Salisbury Plain. They erected three large wooden posts and they kept the clearing clear of rubbish for a long time. Many generations later, once people were settling into farming for a living, someone had the idea of building the henge that later became Stonehenge.    
         
           
   

the three white blobs (looking west).

call me a cynic (I certainly don't have an objective view of English Heritage and other heritage managers / tourist fleecers), but it I'd been in charge when the three postholes were found I would have insisted that the car park got build somewhere else. There's no way they can claim this is a respectful way to deal with the archaeology of this ancient sacred place. And even if they make the postholes visible by painting the car park like this, they really don't make much effort to tell visitors what the three white blobs mean. Most visitors ignore them like they ignore the zebra crossing (zebra, wot zebra?).

    
           
    In October 2007 I spent a few days in the remnants of the Caledonian Pine Forest at Rothiemurchus near Aviemore in Scotland to get a sense of what the Stonehenge clearing might have looked like. As I still have no idea how large or small that clearing was I can't draw any certain conclusions. However, click here for my photos of the forest and clearings.    
         
    You have to read the chapter about "Avebury Stone Circle" in the book Bollocks to Alton Towers: Uncommonly British Days Out for its clarity and justifiable vitriol about the way Stonehenge is presented. Mind you, I suspect that the National Trust are now trying to make visiting Avebury just as awful an experience.

Click here to buy the book from Amazon
  
         
   

A future update of this page will also include a celebration of Wally Hope and his vision too.

    
   
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Watch this space!
    

last updated 8 Dec 2007